چكيده
The purpose of the present study was to see how much listening tasks were effective in Iranian high school context. It was aimed to measure how students would react to tasks. In the current study, Students were instructed by using some tasks like: Turn-taking, convergent tasks, drawing symbols on a weather map, form filling for a hotel registration, making guesses and inferences from a video clip, role playing, selecting the right telephone numbers in the book, listening and selecting the sentences of dialogues in the right order, listening to train announcement in a station, listening to a weather forecast, and Introducing a star or celebrity and the students guessing the name. It also aimed at motivating students to try to improve their listening skill. What was done in this study was to spend some more time on listening skill using tasks to measure how much these tasks could motivate students. To make sure that the participants were approximately at the same level of language proficiency, the Standardized Preliminary English test was administered to fifty students. Then, thirty students whose proficiency scores were near each other were selected as the main participants of the present study. After homogenizing the participants by Standardized Preliminary English Test, a pre-test was conducted. The contents of the Pre-test were based on the school books. Since, it was not possible to separate students at school, a quasi-experimental study was conducted. The next step was the treatment. This process continued for five weeks (ten sessions). Each treatment session contained pre-task, while-task, and post-task (some assignments to do at home). After the treatment sessions, a post-test was given to the students to measure the effect of the treatment. The post-test was at the same level as the pre-test. The post-test scores were also ranked from highest to lowest and the mean was calculated. Then a Paired t-test was used in order to compare the participants’ performance before and after the treatment. The results showed that motivating tasks can provide suitable opportunities to improve listening skill in Iranian junior high school students. The results of paired T-test indicated that students showed improvements in their post-test. There were also interviews from the students during the treatment and also after the post-test to see their attitude to listening tasks. Since a semi-structured interview was used, the students were allowed to add their opinion on the questions. Most of the students showed interest in the listening tasks and they declared that they felt they could learn better this way.
